Ask A DFW Expert: Improve Children's Math Skills

Freddie Halstead 

Mathnasium
8510 Abrams Road
Dallas, TX 75243
(214) 341-4646
www.mathnasium.com/lakehighlandsMathnasium
6709 Snider Plaza
Dallas, TX 75205
(214) 361-6284
www.mathnasium.com/highlandparktx

As a teacher and coach at Marsh Middle School for 13 years, Freddie Halstead understands how children learn and what makes them motivated to succeed. Before becoming an educator, Freddie Halstead worked in sports with the Dallas Stars. He opened Mathnasium in Lake Highlands and later in Highland Park to help children learn the tools to make math fun and enjoyable.

Provide Your Child Access To Math Via His Or Her Passion(s) And Eliminate Talk Surrounding A "Math Gene""I'm just not a math person." "I always struggled with math and my son got it from me." Such sentiments indicate a belief that there is some "math gene." When we allow such statements about math ability (that we don't tend to allow about reading ability), it's harder to sell students on putting in the effort to learn and master mathematics. One way to combat the "I'm not a math person" attitude or to support students' growing interest in mathematics is to expose students to mathematics as embedded in one or more of their passions. If your child is a passionate reader, age-appropriate literature can be used to help see the correlation between the subject they love and math. For example, if you child is interested in baseball, you can teach geometry by looking a baseball field. It is in the shape of a rhombus, or you can have a discussion about player's stats to learn statistics. Regardless of your child's passion, revealing its connection with mathematics is one way to recast mathematics as interesting, useful and valuable instead of inherited.

Make Math Practice And Review Enjoyable By Making A Game Of ItParents can make a game out of math practice with something as simple as a regular deck of cards and/or dice. Younger students might enjoy the math version of Go Fish. Take a regular deck of cards, remove all the face cards, and assign aces the value of one. Play Go Fish using the traditional rules with one exception: two cards are considered a pair when they add to the sum of 10. The winner is the player who has the most pairs once all of the stack's cards have been drawn. Older students might enjoy playing 24. Take a regular deck of cards, remove all of the face cards, and assign aces the value of one. Turn over four cards. The player who can use all four cards to make an equation that adds up to 24 wins that set. Restrict the mathematical operations to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, or allow exponentiation – the choice is yours. The winner is the player who has the most sets once all the cards have been used.

Reinforce Your Child's Number Sense Via Mental MathIf your child is going to purchase items from the .99 cent store, here is a quick way for them to figure out the total for the items.

Example: .99 + .99 + .99 = _____

Instead of setting this problem as a vertical addition problem, students can learn to think, "1.00 + 1.00 + 1.00 = 300 – .03 = $2.97."

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Boost Your Child's Confidence In Math By Supporting Their Reasoning With VisualsThe familiarity of everyday items around the house can bridge practical math with school mathematics. For example, working with $10 bills, $1 bills, dimes and pennies can support understanding of whole number and decimal place value, addition with regrouping, and subtraction with regrouping. Tell your child you have six quarters and want to make a trade for dimes; this will help develop proportional reasoning. Take a measuring cup of a quart of milk and a gallon of milk and have your child estimate how many cups are in a quart, cups are in a gallon and quarts are in a gallon.

Collect Both Technology-Related And Outdoor Math ActivitiesOne of your children lives on the computer, while his or her sibling lives for the outdoors and must be drug inside at the end of each play day. While it's tempting to see tech-loving students as more prone to excel in mathematics than nature lovers, both a love of technology and a love of nature are compatible with learning mathematics. For parents concerned about the amount of time students spend in front of a digital screen, parents can help their children explore the world of math with outdoor activities. Geometry is an area of mathematics abundant in nature. For instance, parents can challenge young photographers-in-the-making to complete a photography scavenger hunt by photographing examples in nature of symmetry, right angles, parallel lines, etc. As another example, the family can engage in a kite-making competition, preceded by research into the geometry behind the most practical and effective kites.

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